Monday, September 30, 2013

If TED talks and Google Labs copulated and spawned a cruise for the Facebook generation, Unreasonable at Sea would be the result.

Among the first to sign up was George Kembel, a founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, known as thed.school, the influential graduate program that teaches creative thinking. “The pitch was, do you want to be a part of this learning experience about what it takes to take innovation global?” said Mr. Kembel, who brought his wife and three young sons on the voyage.

The software giants Microsoft and SAP each paid six figures to secure cabins for their executives, eager for access to fertile minds. The college students were marshaled by the University of Virginia, through its Semester at Sea study-abroad program.

Protei with a $100,000 grant from the Ocean Exchange. But for Ms. Levine, who gave up lucrative work to focus on Mr. Harada’s invention, worries about money and creative fulfillment were top of mind. “I’m not quite where I want to be, professionally,” she fretted in a team-building exercise.

Privacy was at a premium. In addition to the documentary team, which posted online updates throughout the trip, a French television crew followed Mr. Harada and Ms. Levine. The pair stood out by taking an open-source approach to their work, rather than seeking patents, much to the consternation of the profit-minded executives onboard.

“Some mentors even called us communists,” Mr. Harada said later. “I’m coming from the new world, and many of the mentors, with all due respect, they are coming from the old world.”

“Today,” he added, “what creates wealth is what you share, not what you hide.”

In addition to Protei, there were companies focused on turningcarbon emissions into building materials and plants into water filters. Each start-up onboard had been vetted by Mr. Epstein and his team in a process that resembled a college application. Once chosen, they still had to run their international businesses from the ship.

“I’ve never worked so hard in my life,” said Mouhsine Serrar, a mechanical engineering Ph.D. and the founder of Prakti, which manufactures low-cost portable cooking stoves for the developing world

On the other hand, mentors, who mostly came aboard in short spurts, found the journey refreshing. “It was my ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ professionally,” said Prince Fahad, 30, a Saudi royal who runs two high-tech start-ups from San Francisco. He boarded the ship in Cape Town, and disembarked a week later in Ghana.

an assist from Mr. Epstein, Mr. Kembel taught a popular class on creative thinking, using the Unreasonable companies as case studies. On graduation day in the student union, Mr. Kembel handed out Stanford d.School pins — a symbol, he said, of membership in its exclusive society of “wayward thinkers.” As the students linked arms and teared up, Mr. Epstein suggested that, like him, they cement their devotion by getting tattooed with the Unreasonable logo: a light bulb with wings. At least five eventually took him up on it

1. The Founding Fathers compromised on profound issues so the Constitution could be written and ratified, realizing that they couldn’t always get whatever they wanted. But you kids don’t have to because we Republicans don’t.

The president’s health insurance law was passed by Congress and found to be constitutional by the Supreme Court, but we don’t like it. So we voted more than 40 times to get rid of it or change it, and now we are driving the government to shut down because of it.

under 2.

you go to the 1940s, Nazi Germany — Look, we saw in Britain, Neville Chamberlain, who told the British people, ‘Accept the Nazis. Yes, they’ll dominate the continent of Europe but that’s not our problem. Let’s appease them. Why? Because it can’t be done. We can’t possibly stand against th

And then there was Sheryl Nuxoll, a Republican state senator from Idaho who, early this year, sent out a mass mailing saying:

The insurance companies are creating their own tombs. Much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps, private insurers are used by the feds to put the system in place because the federal government has no way to set up the exchange.

3. The U.S. Congress has passed some hideous, immoral laws in its times, including those that have permitted slavery and that allowed for the kidnapping of runaway slaves, and even freed men, from the North so they could be returned to the South. But it’s okay if you think Obamacare is the worst law ever passed. Some of us do.

U.S. Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana recently said that “Obamacare is the most dangerous piece of legislation ever passed in Congress.” In August, Bill O’Brien, a state representative in New Hampshire, likened Obamacare, in its sheer destructive power, to “personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that allowed slave owners to come to New Hampshire and seize African Americans and use the federal courts to take them back to … slave states.”

Back in 2009, a U.S. government investigation foundhundreds of cases of alleged abuse and deaths of children who were subjected to seclusion and restraints in public and private schools over the previous two decades. The probe by the U.S. Government Accountability Office also revealed that there were no federal laws restricting the use of these disciplinary tactics in schools. State laws on restraint and seclusion vary widely; and a good number have none or they have laws that are insufficient to protect all students. Enter the “Keeping All Students Safe Act” in 2010. To make a long story short, it still hasn’t passed; the 2013 version is languishing in committee. Why would anybody oppose legislation that prevents kids from being harmed? Republicans said it tramples on the rights of states. You know, the states that don’t think kids need such protection

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